


How Reid Says Yes

by alicesprings



Series: Pic Fic [8]
Category: As the World Turns
Genre: Digital Art, Fluff, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-24
Updated: 2011-07-24
Packaged: 2017-10-21 17:15:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/227647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alicesprings/pseuds/alicesprings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Series of pic!fic co-written with newssodark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Reid Says Yes

Luke leaves the donor meeting at his foundation exhausted and in a crummy mood. He keeps shifting between anticipation, apprehension, bitterness and outright anger. He had it all planned out, dinner and romance and the proposal to end all proposals. And then Reid screwed it all up and Luke lost it and now it’s there in black pen on Reid’s stupid dayplanner. Now Luke has to worry, because he’s not there to see Reid’s instant reaction to it. Has Reid seen it at all? Is he okay? What will he say? What if he says no? What if Luke gets home and Reid’s just gone?

The idea is both terrifying and infuriating, and since anger is so much easier to deal with than fear, he latches onto it with a vengeance and gets into his car grumpily. It’s only when it digs painfully into his thigh that he remembers his phone in his pocket.

Cautiously, a worried lump in his throat, Luke pulls his cell out and flips it open. He’s got thirty missed calls, fifteen new voicemails, and a new text message...all from Reid.

So he saw the note, then.

Luke winces a little, and rubs the pad of his thumb over the send button benignly a few times before pressing it to call his voicemail. He taps in the code, and holds his breath.

The first message is short. _Luke, I got your message. We need to talk._

Luke snorts derisively. "Where have I heard that before?"

The second message is the same, but the sheer amount of _pissed-offness_ Reid manages to infuse into those nine words is nothing short of amazing.

He plays the third message. _Luke, where the hell are you? Are you ignoring my calls?_

Then opens a text.

[   
](http://s3.photobucket.com/albums/y67/alicesprings/?action=view&current=106-1.jpg)

He skips ahead to the sixth voicemail. _I wasn't ignoring you before, so there's no reason to do it to me now out of spite, okay?_

He’s sure he doesn’t really want to hear voicemails seven through fourteen, so he skips ahead to the fifteenth and final one, left just ten minutes earlier.

 _You can’t just drop this bomb on me and take off, Luke! Get your ass home!_

Luke almost feels bad, but then he remembers the last week and a half of Reid blowing him off over and over again, and he shuts his phone and tosses it onto the dashboard and grips the wheel with both hands. It’s Reid’s turn to have to wait for a while.

 

*

 

Reid’s sitting on the couch, his right leg twitching and his foot tapping staccato against the leg of the coffee table. He’s called Luke umpteen times but the little fucker is ignoring him.

He runs his hands through his hair again, it’s a little longer than usual - he hasn’t had time for a haircut lately - and it’s sticking up in all directions. His fingers are nervously plucking at the band of his watch when he hears a car in the driveway. He springs up off the couch when Luke walks in.

“What the hell, Luke? You proposed to me on my _dayplanner!_ ”

“Well, what can I say,” Luke says in a low, deadpan voice that Reid’s pretty sure is masking a thousand other, less hostile emotions. He tosses his keys onto the coffee table and crosses his arms over his chest, narrowing his eyes. “It sees you more than I do, lately. I figured it was the only way to go.”

Reid throws up his hands. “You could have told me you needed to talk to me!”

He figures out it was the wrong thing to say about a millisecond after it’s out of his mouth, and by then it’s too late. Luke stills, absolutely freezes, and then his mouth opens, closes, opens again and he presses the tip of his tongue to the bottoms of his top teeth in a way that looks startlingly like he’s testing the sharpness of his fangs. His eyes aren’t narrowed, and his face is generally blank, but no one has ever said anything so loudly with just a look before than Luke is right now. It’s only Reid’s exorbitant amount of pride that keeps him from backing up a step.

It’s a tense few seconds that feel like eons, and then Luke shoves his hands dangerously into his pockets and says, “Did you seriously just say that?”

Reid seems to deflate. His shoulders drop and his jaw, clenched tensely since Luke walked in, relaxes a little. “Why now, Luke,” he asks in a quieter voice. “What’s brought this on?”

The tension leaks out of Luke, too, the stiffness in his shoulders easing as the sudden absence of anger seems to make him shrink a little. He shrugs almost shyly, hands still in his pockets, and darts his eyes around the room before settling his gaze on Reid.

“I dunno,” he says softly. “I mean, we’ve been together for four years, and we’ve lived together for two. It makes sense, right? It’s practical, pragmatic...”

He keeps going on like he’s swallowed an entry from a thesaurus, and Reid tunes him out, concentrating on how pretty Luke looks instead, babbling on about all the logical reasons for marriage and god knows what else. He stopped listening three minutes ago. ‘Oh, _Luke_ ,’ he thinks, and tunes back in.

“I just. I love you,” Luke shrugs helplessly. “I want us together forever.”

“We don’t need to get married for that, Luke,” Reid says, deadly serious. “We’re already forever. You know that.”

Then Luke’s babbling again, talking about rings and saying something about wanting people to look at the ring on Reid’s finger and know that someone in the world loves him more than anything or some other such utterly sincere and ridiculous thing that is pure _Luke_.

But then Reid thinks about a ring on Luke’s finger. Thinks about Luke being _his_ and the whole world knowing it. He can’t say no to that shit.

“Yeah, okay,” Reid says, interrupting Luke’s sentence.

Luke’s mouth is still open, the next word he was forming forgotten. “Wait, what?”

“Yeah, okay,” Reid repeats. “Let’s get married.”

“Really?” Luke asks. “You mean it?”

Reid shrugs. “Why not.”

“We don’t have to have a ceremony or anything,” Luke says shyly, one foot toeing at the rug on the floor. Reid knows Luke well enough after all this time to know for certain that ‘we don’t have to have a ceremony’ really means ‘I really, really, really want to have an all out wedding, Reid, and invite all our friends and the entire town and let them bask in our awesome glow, please please please?’

So Reid just rolls his eyes and grabs Luke by a belt loop, pulling him close. “I’m not wearing a tux.”

Luke positively beams at him and reaches up to frame Reid’s face in his hands. They’re warm and dry against Reid’s cheeks and Reid turns his head just slightly to graze his lips over Luke’s palm. “I’ll pay for samplings from all five caterers in town,” he promises.

That sounds pretty good, and Reid’s about to agree when it hits him just what Luke’s implying. “You already know that there are five caterers in town?”

Luke just grins at him, and Reid sighs hopelessly, resigning himself to a lifetime of being twisted around Luke’s little finger by that smile, and surprisingly perfectly okay with it.


End file.
